Inside the Supply Chain and Purchasing Industry

Happy Labour Day! We hope that everyone is enjoying the long weekend and looking forward to a busy Fall (Supply Chain) season.

After a long “up and down” summer we’re rebounding quite nicely with four new orders for those in the Supply Chain field familiar with planning and importing fashion items, expediting home fixtures and appliances – sold at most big box retailers, and yes even coordinating FOOD commodities ! Kindly visit our website at www.timmooreassociates.com more frequently as we enter this busy fall season.

We cornered Tim before he left for the weekend and asked: “what is the biggest resume ‘mistake’ that you’re seeing these days?”

“Clearly, it’s the old internet adage of “your resume HAS to be either one or two pages…complete nonsense for Supply Chain professionals”, remarked Tim. That was appropriate years ago, before the internet really took hold with job sites like Monster, Workopolis, Indeed, and many others. “We used to get maybe 20 to 30 local respondents for each ad we ran, and our actual recruitment efforts were pretty intense to find more qualified people. When you received that little a response, you were busy contacting each respondent, to determine a really good fit. If your resume was ‘concise’ you didn’t have to worry too much, as even if you were close to what the employer was looking for, (and you didn’t have a lot of typos), you’d most likely get a call”, adds Tim.

Nowadays however, firms are getting flooded with HUNDREDS of resumes, per job, on a global scale, and their HR departments are having great difficulty keeping up. This unfortunately is causing MOST HR ‘gatekeepers’ to spend less and less time actually reading resumes. A stat by CareerBuilder (a major employment website in the U.S.), quoted a recent survey, where they found reviewers are spending as little as 15 to 30 SECONDS reviewing each resume… just to enable them to get through the HUGE volume of job applicants! So essentially what’s happening, is that reviewers are spending far less time skimming far less information submitted from candidates. It’s almost impossible with a one or two page resume to hit all the checkmarks, and get into the “A” (interview immediately) pile. “If they can’t find what they’re looking for in 15 to 30 seconds, they’ll just move onto the NEXT resume, with so many to choose from.’ commented Tim.

So in a nutshell, what’s an applicant to do? Here are some ‘tips from Tim’ to successfully get more resume attention.

• Ignore the nonsense about one or two pages and give the reader more ‘meat’ to find and sink their teeth into.
• To catch their immediate attention, have your FULL name AND supply chain designations, and/or university degrees on page one, LINE ONE, right next to your name. If you’re studying toward your SCMP, there’s nothing wrong with “JOHN DOE, SCMP (candidate)” at the top.
• Follow it up with a solid two or three sentence “Career Profile” encapsulating your career. Don’t use an objective. It’s too detailed for an explanation now
• Under each employer listed, you should include a few basic duties and responsibilities, focusing on: size of spend, EXAMPLES OF COMMODITIES, SERVICES, OR RAW MATERIALS you’ve bought or coordinated for the company. (Number of SKU’s, size of warehouse, etc.) and number of people supervised along with their titles. Finally, the hardware, software and other special training or Supply Chain techniques or systems you use. KanBan, Six Sigma, WMS ..

But THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT that Tim identified as VITAL for your resume that most fail to list?

Achievements

It’s the number one oversight on resumes today. And it needs to be clearly identified and separated out from the rest of the information. After your description under EACH employer (as described earlier) you need to drop a line and create a new heading entitled “ACHIEVEMENTS”, and then in bullet form, describe the top two or three successes that you’ve accomplished per recent employer. It could be: cost savings, reduction in lead times, higher turns in inventory, greater shipping or inventory accuracy, implementing best practices, company awards – the works. The more specific you can be – quoting ACTUAL percentages, dollar savings, etc., the more credible you’ll be seen.

So, no matter how rushed the resume reviewer may be, they’ll be able to immediately find and focus on your achievements section(s) and get a faster and more favorable impression of what you’re capable of – based on your past successes.

If this has given you pause for reflection, and you’d like to revise and submit your updated resume to Tim Moore Associates, please send your new resumes to updates@timmooreassociates.com and mark the subject line of your email as ‘destroy old copies’ to alert us of your improved resume. Kindly submit an unlocked MS WORD formatted document.